Word: moraes
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...Depression, dearie," whispers a coyly melancholy Ginger Rogers. That much director Philippe Mora makes starkly clear in his latest film, Brother Can You Spare a Dime? But the vast diversity of the Depression experience for each segment of American society obscures Mora's otherwise successful representation of America in the 1930s; the film becomes a canvas on which he depicts his personal intepretation of the national consciousness during that...
...Mora is experienced with the complex documentary--he achieved notoriety in the creative documentary field with Swastika, and earlier film depicting life in Nazi Germany. And his recent film is a painstakingly constructed documentary in which scenes from newsreels, feature films and home movies are continuously shown in quick succession. The presentation of the clippings Mora finally chooses follows the thread of his own historical outline of the period. And while Mora's treatment of events is roughly chronological, his personal influence in his juxtaposition of images is continually present...
Directed and Written by PHILIPPE MORA...
What makes Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? entertaining beyond its spirit and charm is the manner in which Writer-Director Philippe Mora has organized the footage and orchestrated it to a period score that runs from Duke Ellington and Woody Guthrie through Rudy Vallée and Ginger Rogers. There is no narration, hardly ever a title to identify a person or event. Fact and fiction are interwoven without distinction. For Mora, the hard reality of the Depression is inseparable from all the fancies it produced...
...brilliantly amplified in the "official" footage from which Mora has put together an impressionistic tour of the culture of Nazism. No other film has given so strong a sense of its pervasiveness, or the methodical detail with which it was grafted onto the twin German traditions of folk and high art. Goebbels' cameramen, filming the gnarled peasants at work or the shiny, hopeful faces of village children baking festive rolls in the shape of swastikas, were building on the most popular traditions of 19th century German genre painting-that volkisch sentiment that was Germany's equivalent to America...